Determination of samarium (III) ions in environmental samples after magnetic solid phase extraction using 1, 10- phenanthroline-2, 9-dicarboxilic acid modified Fe3O4/GO nanosheets

There is a growing interest in the development of new methods for extraction of REEs from nuclear wastes.In this study, we fabricated a novel material composed of 1,10-phenanthroline-2,9-dicarboxilic acid (PDA)functionalized magnetic graphene oxide (Fe3O4/GO) for extraction of Sm(III) from aqueous solutions. Ourinterest in selection of carboxyl-containing ligand was due to its good coordination characteristic with Sm(III) which can be used to design a new sorbent. Under the optimized extraction conditions, the calibrationgraph for Sm (III) was linear in a concentration range of 6.2-784.5 μg L-1 with a correlation coefficient of0.9900. A detection limit of 1.4 μg L−1 with an enrichment factor of 125 was obtained. Precisions, expressedas relative standard deviation for single-sorbent repeatability and sorbent-to-sorbent reproducibility,were 5.9% and 8.7% (n =5), respectively. Finally, spiked sea and river waters were analyzed to evaluate theperformance of the proposed method. The high recoveries (>%97) indicate that the suggested protocol isacceptable for determination of Sm (III) ions in the water samples.